


Roadside, South of Rome

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: 7 and 8 specifically, Between Episodes, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mid-Canon, Missing Scene, anger management for mobsters, canon-typical Primo homicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 08:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28468269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Another time Primo almost killed Paul, but didn't.
Relationships: John Paul Getty III & Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	Roadside, South of Rome

_I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him._

He’s flooring it, fury pounding in his veins, one hand on the wheel as he speeds away from the viaduct where the ransom exchange didn’t happen. Once they get out onto the motorway the speedometer ticks past a hundred and forty. It’s way too fast to be taking the curves and he nudges the car faster, relishing it the way you enjoy pressing on a bruise. The gun is a solid weight on his thigh, a promise. _I’ll kill him. I’ll burn him. That’ll show them._ Enough fucking around with billionaires who think they can ignore him when he has their fucking _son._ They think this is a joke? He’ll send their kid home in pieces. He knows how to send a message.

(In the back seat, Paul is curled up very small, long limbs folding in against impending violence, eyes wide and blank in the growing dark.)

He’s going to do it this time. He just needs somewhere isolated where he can pull off the road and walk him into the woods a bit. He’s not getting blood on the upholstery for this shit.

It’s dark by the time he finds a place he’s comfortable with, an hour or so south of the meeting spot, where the road dips through a stand of trees thick enough that some vintner out for an evening stroll won’t become another fucking problem he has to deal with. He’s had the gun in his hand the whole time.

He pulls onto the shoulder, leaving the car running, headlights cutting a path into the trees. Dante follows his cue and gets out of the car when he does, not saying a word. He was around the last time Primo was this angry and his strategy this time has been to call as little attention to himself as possible. Which is probably wise.

“Get out.” He yanks open the back door. Paul is still curled up on the seat. “Out!” He grabs Paul’s arm when he doesn’t move fast enough, and he staggers out of the car, bound hands held out in front of him to shield him from a blow. And he suddenly can’t stand it, Paul’s hands clutched in front of his face, making him think of the way he’d reached out to take the cigarette Primo had offered just hours ago, like this was some shit they were in together. He unties him, cursing under his breath the whole time, and then he slams Paul against the side of the car and ties his hands behind his back, like a proper fucking prisoner.

Into the trees, an iron grip on Paul’s arm pushing him in front of him, close enough to the boy that he can feel him shaking. Find a spot where he can still see a little bit by the light of the headlights. Here will do. He shoves Paul hard enough that he goes to his knees, shoulders hunched in the harsh beam of the headlights, like he knows perfectly well what’s coming.

He aims at the mess of red-gold curls, then changes his mind and walks around to stand in front of Paul. Wouldn’t do to have the exit wound blow a chunk out of his pretty face. He wants to make damn sure they know who it is this time.

It means he has to look Paul in the eye. Fine. It’s never made a goddamn bit of difference before now. He’s ended plenty of lives. (Some people keep count of how many, but he’d stopped doing that a long time ago.) He’s seen people sob and beg and bargain and promise him things and try to apologize when it’s already too late, talk about their wives and children and elderly mothers, and it’s never once given him pause once he’s decided that he’s going to kill someone. Sometimes it’s satisfying and sometimes it’s just a thing that needs doing, but if he has a gun to your head it’s already past time to change anything.

Paul doesn’t bargain or beg. He just stares up at Primo with that look, the same look he’d had with Angelo Calati’s blood all over his face. (He had screamed at Primo to _no, wait, stop_ when he’d leveled the shotgun at Angelo’s head, as if it could have changed anything, but when it came to his own life he’d been silent.) The look in his huge blue eyes isn’t defiance. He’s terrified. It’s like he’s recognized his complete powerlessness over the situation but somehow still wants to look Primo in the eye anyway.

He cocks the gun, and he has the barrel an inch from Paul's forehead, and he can't understand why he's not pulling the trigger. Paul is still staring up at him.

He spits out a long string of curses, stomps five paces away and kicks the shit out of a rotting log lying in the underbrush, yelling and swearing the whole time, until it splits open, a nest of white grubs glinting in the glow of the headlights inside.

Something rustles nearby, a mouse or a rabbit making a break for it, and before he thinks twice about it he turns and fires at it. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Paul flinch.

He doesn’t think he actually hit anything, aiming blindly in the dark, but the bushes are silent. Small things freeze when they know danger is near. Unransomed billionaire kids have much the same instinct, it seems.

Something about the actual act of firing the gun, the bang and the muzzle flash in the dark, has snapped the tripwire-tight tension, like lightning reaching the ground. He scrubs a hand over his face, tucks the gun into the waistband of his pants, and hauls Paul to his feet.

Back at the car, he pops open the trunk and fishes around for the scrap of dark cloth he keeps in there. Sometimes it’s a blindfold; right now it’s a gag that he stuffs in Paul’s mouth. “In.” He nods to the trunk. Paul makes a valiant go of trying to figure it out without the use of his hands before Primo swears under his breath and helps him. He doesn’t have it in him to be _gentle_ or anything, but he doesn’t go out of his way to hurt him.

He slams the trunk and paces around some. Dante, who may as well have been a tree this whole time for how much Primo has paid attention to him, hovers uncertainly by the passenger side door.

He has to think. It’s easier to think with the kid in the trunk.

He’s still angry. He’s still fucking _furious,_ the craving to smash things and burn things and make someone hurt still clawing around under his skin.

He knows rage. It was the first language he’d learned, before he could speak. He’d already been fluent by the time of his earliest memories, watching from under the kitchen table while his mother swept up the shards of a bowl his father had thrown against the wall.

Sometimes rage is useful. Sometimes it’s perfect, heady and pure, better than anything he’s ever sucked up his nose or pumped into his veins. Rage gets things done, sometimes. It makes people listen to you.

This isn’t the good kind. This is the helpless rage of being held down by someone stronger than you, the howling fury at the possibility that there might be _no way_ to get what he wants. No way to make these rich fucks _listen,_ no way to reach them or touch them, that even the threat of violence against their _child_ isn’t enough to puncture their invulnerability.

The anger boils over again. He draws the gun just to feel the weight of it in his hand, and he thinks about opening the trunk and just shooting Paul right there, before the kid gets a chance to turn that martyr’s stare on him again.

He could shoot Paul right now, and no one could stop him.

He could shoot Paul right now and Paul’s cold-hearted family still wouldn’t care, and they’d still be richer than God, and he’d still be nothing.

He bangs his fist on the trunk, just to have somewhere for the crackling energy to go. From inside, he hears a tiny, bitten-off sound. The sound of someone vulnerable desperately trying not to attract the attention of someone angry.

He hisses out a breath between his teeth. He’s still holding the gun, but he makes himself walk away from the trunk, at least. It’s not Paul’s fault that no one came for him, after all.

No one came for him. On his fucking birthday. The absurd cruelty of it makes him want to laugh. He'd thought rich people valued their children more than that.

Okay then. He needs to think. And before he can do that he needs to calm down.

What was it Leonardo had said, in the farmhouse, the last time he had managed not to kill Paul?

 _Breathe._ He remembers that one. _Put the gun down._

He unglues his hand from the pistol and sets it on the roof of the car, and then braces his hands on the doorframe and takes a long, slow breath in and out. Does that four or five more times.

It does help, a little. Not having the gun in his hand makes it feel a tiny bit less like he’s a sideways glance away from pulling the trigger. The feeling like a wild animal clawing its way through his skin from the inside recedes an infinitesimal amount.

It’s fucking annoying, is what it is, feeling Leonardo’s dumb platitudes actually work. He hates how often that motherfucker is right.

After a few minutes, he is calm enough to lean back against the car and light a cigarette. He needs to _think._

The fucking Gettys have made them look like damn fools twice now. Here you deal with that with bullets and blood in the streets. But the Gettys are untouchable, unreachable.

Except. Salvatore had been face to face with Old Man Getty, hadn’t he? He’d wandered around through a ruined villa with him. (The location that Getty had picked, that Getty had closed to tourists for the day with a phone call, that Getty had strolled through like it was his own damn palace in _their_ country.) And Salvatore had come back smiling and saying they’d done good business together, with not a fucking clue that Getty was just planning to humiliate them all.

The old man is getting dull and slow, has been for some time, chasing the same small ideas with no vision and no ambition. And Primo will still be the one strung up if he comes back without the ransom.

He’s not letting that happen. If there’s anything he has faith in, it’s his own snarling scrabbling bloody-minded determination to survive. He’ll get himself out of this. But he’s smart enough to know when he’s got his back against the wall, and he’s out of moves, and he needs help. And there’s exactly one person he is confident will help him without question.

“Get in the car,” he snaps at Dante, who only flinches a little at suddenly being the focus of his attention.

“Do you have a plan?” Dante ventures as they kick up a cloud of dust zooming back onto the motorway.

“Not yet.” It will take five hours to drive back to Calabria, and he knows his chances are better if he doesn’t wake Leonardo up in the middle of the night. He’ll still have some time to think before dawn. Come up with a backup option if everything goes to shit. “But I know someone who will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/)


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